The first four christmas seasons we celebrated in this house we decorated our house on the outside first. But this year the order was different because of the weather on the days I had time to work on the outside. Not that the weather was better and that sunday is the most ideal day to work in Germany but it needed to be done today because the next weeks my schedule would be tight and we don’t want to be the last in the street with our decorations. And as in the last 4 years we are the first in our street (probably city too) with our outdoor decorations.

Outside we’ve an environmental friendly setup which consist of LED lights only from the brand SYSTEM LED. The color of the LEDs is white daylight and in total there are 700 LEDs connected to the balcony. And especially with snow this gives an amazing effect because of the light reflections on the snow.

Since we also want to see something from our outdoor decorations we’ve started with LED acrylic figures. Last year we already had a reindeer with 40 white LEDs but it looked lonely. So we decided to add a polar-bear with 64 white LEDs to it.

I can’t wait for the first snow to see our new addition in a real winter setting.

Today was an ideal day to start preparing for Christmas, Danielle was at work and I didn’t had to go to work because of All Saints’ Day. This is a regional public holiday in Germany. So that means time to set up our Christmas-tree! You might think we are crazy (maybe we are) but it’s a lot of work to set up the tree and we want to enjoy it longer as just a couple of weekends. It’s still the same artificial tree we have as last year. Some facts about our tree:

• 2,15 meter high
• 1,35 in diameter (at the widest point)
• 800 Warm white lights
• 5 White Garlands
• 100+ White, Silver and Transparent Ornaments (Apples, Roses, Angels, Butterflies, Grapes, Glass Bauble and more)
• 1 White tree skirt

I started this morning at about 11 o’clock. And than I figured out the I had a big problem, last year I dismantled the tree faster than ever and now I know why, the light strings where all knotty. So it took me almost an hour to get this far:

And about 2 hours later the tree was setup and all of the 800 lights were lit:

And 20 minutes later I had the Garlands in place:

Then it was tim to get all the ornaments together since it’s best to have an overview before starting with putting them in the tree. I mean we want to have the nicest ornaments on the parts of the tree we see most of the time. And we also want to divide them equally around the tree. It took almost 2 hours before I had all the ornaments in the tree. I didn’t count them but there are definitely more than 100 ornaments.

And finally we had a Christmas-tree again:

And some close-ups of the ornaments: